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I’m SO glad I went to class last night.

The subject was “Greece, Homer and the Hero” and the assigned reading was the first book of the The Iliad. The text that we used is Robert Fagles’ translation. I found this site with an example of the important differences a translation can make.

I admit, I skimmed the reading and came away feeling the same as I did when we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in my sophomore year of high school. I had a basic sense of the plot and the main characters, but the beauty of it was totally lost on me. This is precisely why I’m taking the class – even if I did have the discipline to sit around and read Homer, I’m not going to get anything out of it that way. The way the professor explained the story is in the context of how the ancient Greeks perceive the human relationship with God, and the role of man (and let’s face it, it was just man) in the universe.

The excitement of the story really came alive, especially since the story was an oral tradition, a 16,000 line poem that was memorized and passed from generation to generation before Homer wrote it down. You can really see how it would be to sit around a fire and have someone telling it aloud, talking about how angry Achilles’ words had made Agamemon:

“…among them rose the fighting son of Atreus, lord of the far-flung kingdoms, Agamemnon – furious, his dark hear filled to the brim, blazing with anger now, his eyes like searing fire.”

I can just see the little Greek kids wanting to hear just a little more, just five more minutes, before having to go to bed.

Hearing the words spoken aloud, especially the way the mortals in the story struggle and interact with the Gods, it made me suddenly realize why this was such an amazing period, and why, at the end of the Dark Ages, the early Renaissance artists and philosophers sought out inspiration from the ancient Greeks. I knew that, that message had been drummed into my head in college humanities classes, but it never quite clicked until last night.

We were looking at a slide of the Parthenon, and the professor described the way the building mirrors ancient Greek philosophy of man – that humankind should seek up to attain it’s full potential. The elegant columns reaching from the earth to the sky, the architecture reflects that ethos of man reaching for the sky. Then I thought of the churches built in the dark ages, the so much cruder images of man hunched down, the threat of damnation keeping man cowering in fear. A light went on and I suddenly understood in a way I just hadn’t before.